‘I have a notion that the thing may spread. It began with a badgering of Eliot himself – getting him into embarrassing embroilments with his neighbours. I think it possible that others of the family may come to be persecuted in the same way. That’s all.’
‘I see. No, there has been nothing at Oxford – or Timmy has told me of nothing.’ Winter’s eye went from Appleby to the wall on which the Renoir had hung. He appeared to hesitate. ‘By the way, something has come into my head. Rupert Eliot wants to hunt down what he calls the low blackguard. Just how low do you think the blackguard is?’
‘I don’t know that I’ve made an estimate.’
‘It’s just a point about the picture. You say it hasn’t been stolen for gain, and I rather agree. But if the theft is simply a malicious gesture against Eliot’s present to his daughter why a laborious theft at all? Why hide it away and paint the spider on the wall? I believe that if I were a particularly low sort of blackguard I would be prompted to do my painting on the picture.’
Appleby looked momentarily as shocked as a police detective may decently look. ‘It’s a point,’ he said.
‘It suggests’, Winter continued carefully, ‘that the blackguard, while callous in respect of personal relationships, has some conscience in regard to works of art. You might look round for somebody like that. Such folk exist even among the most respectable.’
It was challenge for challenge. Appleby walked over to the open window. ‘Winter,’ he said, ‘come here.’ He flashed the torch on the flower-bed below; it travelled over a neat line of footprints in the damp earth. ‘Clues,’ he went on, ‘and, as I say, I’m wasting no time on them.’ There was a pause. ‘You know, an affair like this does curiously evoke wanton impulses – even in what you term the most respectable. It’s the crude instinct to get into the limelight, and it can unite with the refined play-instinct of the intellectual. Which is why I oughtn’t to have talked of all this so lightly as being a matter for intellectual excitement. I don’t suppose you are the perpetrator of this barbarous trick with Belinda’s picture, and I don’t want to waste effort on playing a game with you. There’s been enough hide-and-seek tonight to last us some time. You’ve taken it into your over-ingenious academic head to pitch clues at me for the amusement of seeing if I’m smart enough to pick them up. Lay off. I don’t care twopence whether you cherish personal relationships or Attic pots or what.’
Winter sighed into the night. ‘I lead a sheltered life, and it’s a long time since I’ve been lectured. But no doubt you’re right.’ His voice grew wholly sober. ‘It is really so serious? I have a feeling that Eliot’s mind is not so vulnerable as it appears.’
‘I rather agree. As he went out just now I had an odd notion–’ Appleby paused as if hunting for words.
‘You felt that he has, though he doesn’t show it himself, a shot in the locker still.’
‘Exactly.’ Appleby looked keenly at his companion. ‘He doesn’t know it, or knows it only in an obscurely subliminal way… I wish we could be sure that the persecution will stop short at its present forms. It may do that – perhaps ramifying out, as I have suggested, to include the children or the cousins. On the other hand all this may merely be preliminary play – a cat and mouse effect before the kill.’
‘The kill? You mean that?’
They had been staring into darkness; now Appleby shut down the window and walked slowly to the centre of the room. ‘Tonight’, he said, ‘we have had the Birthday Party. Think of it in italics: The Birthday Party – an old story Eliot never wrote. You know the title of the book he has been working on recently? Murder at Midnight. You know where it is set?’
‘Indeed I don’t.’ Winter’s voice was now strained as well as sober.
‘No more do I. But my sister has had a guess. Folly Hall.’
PART TWO
Murder at Midnight
1
England heeled over and through clouds which loomed like cattle issuing from a murky fold light struck boldly at the spires of Canterbury. It flowed westward tower by tower, up the estuary of the Thames to grope vainly through fog for St Stephen’s and Westminster Cathedral, up the narrowing river to touch the pinnacles of Magdalen, the great churches of the wool trade, the weathercock that circles high above the dust of Shakespeare. Southward and as the sun rode higher the light, struggling fitfully through a vapour-burdened sky, caught at lesser monuments: at Warter throwing a sudden glory over the red brick chapel by the post-office; creating a momentary minaret of the smoke-stack which crowns the blanket-factory at King’s Cleeve. Dawn came to Wing; to Low Swaffham morning; there was common day at Pigg. In Wing the medieval glass glowed rich and dark; the mist stirred and drifted by the sallows of Low Swaffham; and the temperance institute at Pigg cast its diurnal challenge at the credence of the sun.
The temperance institute at Pigg is in the form of an early Saxon mede-hall. For this is the Shoon country; Pigg lies in the shadow of Shoon Abbey; has so lain for nearly ten years. Low Swaffham is on the eastern fringe, and Low Swaffham has a pair of stocks, a ducking-stool, a scold’s bridle, a chastity-belt, and a chained library. Little Limber is on the opposite verge, and here stands a public shelter with pound attached, the whole in the form of Caedmon’s Cowshed, site of the composition of the first English lyric. Intermediate hamlets enjoy similar benefactions, various in form but all striking the same pronouncedly historical note, and all bearing a uniform inscription ending with the words Donum Dedit Jasper Shoon Sacrosanctae Antiquitatis Amator.
England heeled over the sun threaded the steel-spun ruins of Shoon Abbey itself, gliding down the great west tower to light the chill and naked concrete of the unfinished infirmary, peering through a curtain at the stertorous slumbers of the learned Dr Bussenschutt. But the sun – who is no antiquarian and is ever hunting the morrow – passed on unpausing; at Snug they began taking down the shutters; at La Hacienda near Snug white walls glittered – one wall more freshly white than the rest – and dogs howled; Lady Pike rang a bell and spoke of biscuits, Mrs Birdwire’s Zulus moved heavily in the kitchens. The sun, lighting indifferently these and more sober things, passed on through Cold Findon, laid awakening fingers on Rust Hall, rolled across the park and striking through a final plantation of larches began to cast long shadows across Rust Heath beyond.
It was Saturday morning.
John Appleby opened his eyes and remembered the night. After the distressing events of the previous evening would the party go on? Probably it would. It was that sort of party and only the positive appearance, say, of a hearse trundling up the drive could be guaranteed to disperse it.
And frequent hearses, Appleby said to himself, shall besiege your gates. There was plenty of vindictiveness in Mr Eliot’s Pope. And plenty of vindictiveness at Rust? – it would be comforting clarification if one could believe that the trouble lay in that: spite and revenge. Here lay the territory of the Eliot family history, and of those anomalous cousins, the literary Archie and the professedly active but indefinably lurking Rupert. Here too lay the territory of extra-familial grudges, of all the interests and emotions which must surround so big an affair as the Spider: the aggrieved Overall and the impatient Kermode. A large ground. But it would be comforting if it exhausted the possibilities.
Appleby prepared to jump out of bed and was prevented by the appearance of a young person with tea. Curious, to what Mr Eliot would call a speculative mind, that a young person should have to bring him tea and murmur that it was eight o’clock. Appleby sipped tea and munched bread and butter – an immaterial sliver, negligible for purposes of nutrition: we are surrounded by nugatory rituals. He remembered that, among other things, there was a picture to recover; it conjured itself up in his mind. Of something like the young person now drawing the curtains – only a shade plumper – Renoir could make all that. And his own life was given to unprofitable things: to preserving law and order that morning tea might arrive securely at unnumbered prosperous bedroom doors. And Mr Eliot’s life �
� The young person had departed and Appleby jumped out of bed.
He threw open the window and looked out at a sky of dull grey watered silk, uncertainly shot with yellow light. Starlings were bubbling somewhere overhead; a random impulse made him address them with more Pope:
‘Sol through white curtains shot a tim’rous ray,
And ope’d those eyes that must eclipse the day;
Now lap-dogs gave themselves the rouzing shake – ’
He paused, startled. Somewhere near by the verses had been taken up in a modulations which put his own to shame:
‘And sleepless lovers, just at twelve awake;
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the present watch returned a silver sound.
Belinda still her downy pillow pressed – ’
The chanted lines, which came from the next window, seemed a species of invitation; Appleby slipped on a dressing-gown, went into the corridor, and knocked at his neighbour’s door. A voice called, ‘Come in!’ He entered and found an apparently empty room. But the voice said, ‘If we aren’t liter-ayery!’ A beautiful voice that seemed to speak from beneath the bed.
Appleby crossed the room. It was Peter Holme, lying supine before the window in his pyjama trousers. ‘The control of the abdomen,’ he said. ‘No more of those ostentatious and futile jerks. One just lies on one’s back and pushes one’s belly in and out. You can eat my bread and butter.’
‘Do you do this regularly?’ Appleby ate the bread and butter and contemplated Holme’s belly. In or out, it gave a beautiful straight line.
‘Now and then – for conscience’ sake. It’s in my film contract, along with my weight and when I’m to go to bed and lord knows what.’
‘Dear me, yours must be an exacting profession.’
‘It’s this awful Spider. They’ve taken it into their heads that he must be uncommonly spidery. Quite a new idea, too. When I took the old Spider to the States I made him sinisterly obese and it was a great success. There’s no reason at all why a spider should be a skeleton. If you look at the nasty creatures you’ll find that they’re mostly a round, grey blob. It’s just like those awful film folk. I curse the day I entered their so-called studios.’ Peter Holme sprang lithely to his feet. ‘You’ve seen the next in low joints in Paris. It’s a hip roll.’ He rolled.
‘Marseille,’ said Appleby absently. Here was a new light on the far-reaching consequences of Mr Eliot’s genius. ‘You find’, he added encouragingly, ‘your contract irksome?’
Holme gave Appleby a look which indicated that he thought this a pedantic and colourless form of expression. Then for some seconds he conscientiously rolled, finally breaking off to say challengingly, ‘Look here, are you down at Rust in a professional way?’
‘Not exactly. But I suppose I carry something of my profession about with me. I think you’ll agree’ – Appleby grinned inoffensively – ‘that quite a lot of people do.’
With the effect of some instrument of precision coming to rest, Holme stopped rolling. ‘Rust’, he said, ‘teems this year with quips and quipsters. But seriously’ – his face flooded with seriousness as he spoke – ‘you do intend to let the thing take its natural course?’ The seriousness took on the quality of appeal which one wise man might address to another. ‘It seems the only thing to do, doesn’t it?’
‘Its natural course? The general opinion seems to be that matters are pretty unnatural at the moment. Even supernatural if we are to believe Mrs Moule.’ Appleby sat down on the bed and looked curiously at the actor.
‘Of course I agree that the situation is odd.’ Holme began to dress. ‘But I feel it’s rather what one might expect. Did you ever keep goldfish – I mean in an ambitious way?’
‘Two fish and a bowl for a shilling; never anything more grandiose than that.’
‘Ah. Well, now, the culture of goldfish is exceedingly interesting. It has gone on for thousands of years and the creatures are the nearest thing to a purely artificial creation breathing. Do fish breathe?’
‘Decidedly.’
‘I thought they did. As I say, they are highly organized and over-exploited organisms. The result is that they are very unstable. At any time the oddest things may happen. They will emerge without fins – and fish, it seems, simply must have fins – or with far more fin than fish. The creatures are in a state of artificial perfection, with very little relation to any state of nature, and in consequence they are liable to grotesque breakdowns. I have an idea it may be rather the same with Spiders.’
Appleby pondered this suggestion. ‘I don’t think’, he said, ‘that I’ve ever heard a more imaginatively confused or intellectually worthless analogy. Did you think of it yourself?’
‘I thought of it’, said Holme, unoffended, ‘just before I got up. I don’t say that it’s exactly philosophical, but I think you’re a bit hard on it, all the same. Think of all that talk yesterday about creating autonomous worlds, and lord knows what. It’s true, in a way. Poor old Eliot has created a large, ramshackle and highly artificial world of his own that sprawls through thirty-seven volumes. It’s natural enough that something should go wrong: two heads on one neck or fins in the most unlikely place.’
‘Your thought is much less coherent than Mrs Moule’s. In fact, you have a muddled mind.’
Reaching up for a jacket in a posture that almost perfectly evoked the Apollo Belvedere, Peter Holmes nodded amiable agreement. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the dimmest notion what it’s all about. But I do think’ – he spoke with sudden exquisite earnestness – ‘it should be left alone. I had a talk with Eliot yesterday – I’m not sure I didn’t mention it to some people in the billiard-room before you came. I gathered that he really did think of giving over. It was a grey day, just like this. But do you know, the sun seemed to shine and the birds to break into song.’
‘And the goldfish to whisk their redundant tails.’
‘Just that. I sent a wire to my agent at once. And it’s all right.’
‘All right?’
Holme’s face assumed an expression of preternatural cunning. ‘Kermode,’ he said. ‘I thought at once of Kermode. Vassalage to that renegade hearty would be quite the last straw. But it’s perfectly all right. I’m tied up for plays done out of books written by Eliot himself – nothing else. So I do think things should be let alone.’
‘I see. In one direction at least your clarity of vision is abundant and undisputable.’
‘But, mind you,’ continued Holme as if suddenly anxious to vindicate himself, ‘though I may be muddled I’m quite open-minded. I’ve no theory at all. And I didn’t a bit sympathize with the line Chown was taking when he blew in this morning.’
‘Chown blew in this morning?’ Appleby was surprised.
‘With the bird of dawning Chown blew in – for professional consultation.’
‘Professional consultation? He surely doesn’t think that you are positively–’
‘Officer, officer! You’re getting it wrong; Chown came in to consult me. A clever fellow, really. He realizes – unlike those awful newspapers – that an actor is the best critic of acting. One day I’m going to be a dramatic critic and eat as much as I like.’
‘An actor’, said Appleby, ‘is always likely to be the best actor. I wouldn’t myself go further than that. But tell me about Chown.’
The bubbling innocence of Peter Holme might have been thought to subside momentarily into thoughtfulness; he seized a phial from the dressing-table and applied its aromatic contents to his waving chestnut hair. ‘Chown’, he said, ‘has quite taken old Eliot into his bughouse fold. I gather Eliot was patient of his for a bit some years ago. Now he says it’s his duty to protect him.’
‘What’s that – Eliot was a patient of Chown’s?’ Appleby was suddenly vividly interested. ‘You’re sure of that?’
‘I can’t say I am. The old boy’s a stickler for his professional etiquette except when he’s feeling a bit shirty. I just got that i
mpression – that Eliot had been to Chown without telling the family. And anyway, he’s all for wading in now. This opinion of mine he was after: he seemed to feel it might help him to sort things out. That’s why I wasn’t awfully keen on him. And why I’m not sure that I feel at all keen on you. I’m opposed to sorting things out at all; in my view it would be a great pity.’
‘And Chown – how does he want to sort things out? Just what was he after?’
Holme shook his head, his expression more vacuous and cunning than before. ‘That’s secrets,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you this: the old boy went off as pleased as punch – like a kid that’s found a particularly rare bug. And, as I say, it was smart of him to come along.’
‘It might be described’, said Appleby, ‘as leaving no stone unturned.’
Retreating to the corridor, Appleby ran into a large, moist sponge. Behind it was Gerald Winter.
‘I had begun to think’, said Winter absurdly, ‘that you were only a curious dream. And here you are again – as solid as the kind who stand outside the Houses of Parliament; a portly man, to be a sergeant able.’ He peered at Appleby in the half light. ‘And – alas! – impervious to impertinence. Tell me: what are you? The whole house seethes with curiosity. The assistant-commissioner?’
‘A chief-inspector, CID. And now curb your morning gamesomeness. Do you know this Peter Holme? Is he really and truly the light-comedy figure that he appears?’
‘Tell me if Congreve’s fools be fools indeed.’
Appleby raised a protesting hand. ‘Today’s motto’, he said, ‘is No Popery. What do you really know of Holme?’
‘That he’s a good actor and consequently an able man. And that if anyone has been treating him somewhat as a patch of motley he will apply his art to the amusement of playing you up. By the way, I have news.’
Well, well.’
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